Individual Entry

EA “dumps DRM” for The Sims 3

Once again it seems that I’m reporting on a story only once it’s become old hat, but in case you missed the article, Electronic Arts, the champion of draconian digital rights management, have announced that it will not be enforcing mandatory online activation and limited installations for its upcoming juggernaut, The Sims 3.

It may not sound like much, but in my opinion this is huge. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve seen the back of over-intrusive DRM on EA products for good, but I take the fact that the company is omitting it from what will surely be their biggest PC release of the year as a tacit admission that such anti-consumer strategies don’t work. The DRM-infected Spore did, after all, notoriously become the most pirated game of all time, with cracked copies appearing on torrent sites before it had even hit store shelves, and the overall effect was simply to infuriate customers, leading to online smear campaigns, 1-star rating tag-teaming on Amazon and organised boycotts of EA products. So, if you contributed to any of these activities, wrote EA an angry letter or email, or did anything to publicly voice your displeasure at their noxious behaviour, give yourself a pat on the back, because this is a significant victory, and you made it possible.

Comments

1.

Good news and if I was actually interested in The Sims I would definetely buy the game.

Posted by: Peter von Frosta, April 11, 2009 2:25 PM

2.

Yeah, I must admit that it’s not so much for The Sims 3 that this news excites me so much as the potential that future EA releases will be free of these issues. Dragon Age: Origins and future Command & Conquer games would be a case in point.